Jinhua Zhao is the Professor of Cities and Transportation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He founded and directs the MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI), a global platform to accelerate a safe, clean, and inclusive mobility system. He hosts the MIT Mobility Forum, showcasing transportation innovation from MIT and across the globe. He leads the program “Mens, Manus and Machina (M3S): How A.I. Impacts the Future of Work and Future of Learning,” funded by the Singapore National Research Foundation. He directs the JTL Urban Mobility Lab and Transit Lab at MIT, leading long-term collaborations with transportation authorities and operators worldwide and enabling cross-cultural learning between cities in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Prof. Zhao integrates behavioral and computational thinking to shape sustainable travel behavior, design mobility systems, and reform urban policies. He develops computational methods to sense, predict, nudge, and regulate travel behavior and designs multimodal mobility systems that integrate automated and shared mobility with public transport. He sees transportation as a language to describe a person, characterize a city, and understand an institution, and establishes the behavioral foundation for transportation systems and policies. He studies how A.I. can improve human capital development and boost economic growth in cities.